U.S. Slavery

Filmmaker Ken Burns is the director of "The Civil War" and "Baseball," the hit documentaries on PBS. The former was the network's highest rated series. Burns' newest project is the three-hour documentary, "Thomas Jefferson" about our third president, narrated by Ossie Davis.

Historian and author Nell Irvin Painter is a Professor of American History at Princeton University. She's written a biography of the ex-slave and fiery abolitionist who was born Isabella Van Wagenen and rechristened herself Sojourner Truth, called "Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol."

Caryl Phillips, author of five novels, a work of nonfiction and many scripts for film, theater, radio and television. His new novel,"Crossing the River" (Knopf), tells stories of slavery and the relationships forged by and among some of its perpetrators and victims. Phillips takes liberties with time in following the lives of three African children sold into slavery by their desperate father -- one freed and sent back to Africa as a missionary, one searching for her lost husband and child in the American wild west and one, a World War II GI stationed in Yorkshire, England.

Writer Allan Gurganus. His novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which is scheduled for publication later this fall, is the story of a blind 99-year-old widow, now confined to a nursing home, whose stories about her life and her husband's take in almost 150 years of American history. Mostly her stories focus on her husband and how his experiences in the Civil War, when he was only 13, haunted him, and her, until he died. Gurganus, a professor of writing at New York's Sarah Lawrence University, has written for The New Yorker, Harpers and The Atlantic Monthly.

The Temple professor and Pen/Faulkner Award-winning author explains the historical context of his new novel, The Chaneysville Incident. He discusses his different experiences with racism in the North and South, as well as his involvement in the organizing of Philadelphia-area writers.

Historian Philip Foner joins the show again to discuss Black history in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. Foner is the foremost historian on the labor movement in the U. S. He is the author of over eighty works, including a four volume history of the American labor movement, "Organized Labor and the Black Worker," and "Women and the American Labor Movement," the second volume of which was recently published. He is currently a visiting professor at Rutgers University.